thought would lead him to Rebecca, it was the soldier with the fork in his shoulder, and Billy stopped just long enough to take aim, to fire two rounds into its already oozing head. The first went wide, but the second shot blew a substantial piece of bone out the back of its skull, painting the wall behind it with rotten gray matter. It hung there a moment, the body, and Billy was already past it by the time it hit the floor. Through the door, which opened into a short hall. Left or right? Without a map of the first floor he couldn't know, but the placement of the stairs on the basement map suggested left. With no time to reason it out he hurried on, leading with his weapon, down a few steps and around a giant, hissing boiler. Steam clouded the maintenance room, but he found his way, found another set of stairs, metal and rusted.
At the bottom was a door. He pushed through, remembering from the map that he would enter a large room with some kind of fountain in the middle, something big and round, anyway. There were two smaller rooms to the west, branched off from another short hall, and one of them should be where Rebecca was, the one all the way at the end, maybe—
The big room was cold and damp, the walls and floor made of stone. He ran through, glancing at a large monument to his left, what he'd thought was a fountain on the map. It was some kind of statuary. Blind eyes stared at him from the faces of carved animals, watching him sprint by—
—and there was a shriek from the hall just ahead, a blind corner, but he knew the sound from only a minute before: There was another monkey there. Shit! He'd have to take it out, couldn't risk turning his back on it—
“Billy—please—“
The voice over the radio was desperate, and Billy put on speed, ignoring the part of him that commanded him to stop, to wait for the animal to show itself so that he could dispatch it from a safe distance. He dashed ahead, around the corner, and there was the monkey, terrible, shredded-looking, howling—
—and Billy, who'd run track in high school, leaped. He hurdled over it and came down only two steps from a door, the door, the monkey shrieking in anger behind him. If the door was locked, he was in trouble, but it wasn't. He bolted through, slamming it behind him, dropping and skidding on his knees to the great hole in the floor.
She was there, still there, hanging on with only one hand now, and he could see that she was slipping. He dropped his handgun and shot out his arm, grasping her wrist even as her whitened fingertips let go.
“Got you,” he panted. “I got you.”
Rebecca started to cry as he rocked back on his heels, lifting her out of the hole, feeling a satisfaction that he'd almost forgotten had existed after all those months in jail—the sure, easy knowledge that he'd done the right thing, and done it well.
Billy pulled her out of the hole, using his body as leverage, pulling her practically on top of him in a rough embrace. Instead of pushing away, she let him hold her a moment, clinging to him, unable to stop the tears of gratitude, of relief. He seemed to under-stand what she needed, and held her tightly. She'd been so sure that she was going to fall, to die, lost and forgotten in some stinking basement, her corpse picked over by diseased animals ...
After a moment she rolled off him, wiping at her face with one shaking hand. They both sat on the floor, Billy looking around at the bleak rock walls of another nondescript basement chamber, Rebecca looking at Billy. When the silence stretched too long, she reached out, put a hand on his arm.
“Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life. Again.”
He glanced at her, looked away. “Yeah, well. We have that truce thing, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “And I also know you're not a killer, Billy. Why were you on your way to Ragithon? Did you—were you really involved in those murders?”
He met her gaze evenly. “You could say that,” he said. “I was there, anyway.”
/ was there. .. That wasn't the same thing as actually killing anyone. “I don't think you killed your escort earlier tonight; I think it was one of these creatures, and you just ran,” she said. “And I know I haven't known you for very long, but I don't believe that you murdered twenty-three people, either.”
“It doesn't matter,” Billy said, staring at his boots. “People believe what they want to believe.”
“It matters to me,” Rebecca said, her voice gentle. “I'm not going to judge. I just want to know. What happened?”
He was still staring at his boots, but his gaze had gone distant, as if seeing another time, another place. “Last year, my unit was sent to Africa, to intervene in a civil war,” he said. “Top secret, no U.S. involvement, you understand. We were supposed to raid a guerrilla hideout. It was summer, the hottest part of summer, and we were dropped well outside the strike zone, in the middle of a dense jungle. We had to hike in a ways ...“
He trailed off a moment, reaching for his dog tags, holding them tightly. When he spoke again, his voice was even softer. “The heat got half of us. The enemy got most of the rest, picking us off one at a time. By the time we got to where the hideout was supposed to be, there were only four of us left. We were exhausted, half crazy, sick with the heat, sick with—with heartsickness, I guess, watching our buddies die.
“So when we reached the hideout coordinates, we were ready to blow all of them away. Make someone pay, you know? For all that sickness. Only, there was no hideout. The tip-off wasn't valid. It turned out to be some dumpy little village, just a bunch of farmers. Families. Old men and women. Children.”
Rebecca nodded, encouraging him to go on, but her stomach was starting to knot. There was an inevitability to the story; she could see where it was headed, and it wasn't pretty.
“Our team leader told us to round them up, and we did,” Billy said. “And then he told us—“
His voice broke. He reached out and picked up his dropped weapon, stuffing it into his belt almost angrily as he stood up, turning away. Rebecca stood up, too.
“Did you?” she asked. “Did you kill them?”
Billy turned back to her, his lips curled. “What if I tell you that I did? Would you judge me then?”
“Did you?” she asked again, studying his face, his eyes, determined to at least try and understand. And it was as though he could see it in her, could see that she was working to be open to the truth. He stared at her a moment, then shook his head.
“I tried to stop it,” he said. “I tried, but they knocked me down. I was barely conscious, but I saw it, I saw it all . . . and I couldn't do anything.” He looked away before continuing. “When it was over, when we were picked up, it was their word against mine. There was a trial, sentencing, and—well, then this happened.”
He spread his arms, encompassing their surroundings. “So if we make it out of here, I'm dead, anyway. It's that or I run, and keep running.”
It all had the ring of truth. If he was lying, he deserved an Oscar ... And she didn't think he was.
She tried to think of something to say, something reassuring, that would make things better somehow, but nothing came. He was right about his options.
“Hey,” he said, looking at something past her shoulder. “Check it out.”
She turned as he stepped by, saw a stack of scrap metal pieces leaning against the far wall—and half-hidden among them, what looked like a shotgun.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
Billy picked up the weapon, grinning as he pumped it, checking the action. “Yes, ma'am, it certainly
is.”
“Is it loaded?”
“No, but I have a couple of shells, left from the train. It's a twelve gauge.” He smiled again. “Things are looking up. We may not make it, but there's a monkey out in the hall that's just begging for a taste of this baby.”
“Actually, I think it's a baboon,” she said, surprised to find herself smiling back. Then they were both chuckling, struck by the absolute pointlessness of her correction. They were trapped in an isolated mansion, hunted by God knew how many kinds of monster, but at least they knew that the creature in the hall was probably a baboon. Their chuckles turned to laughter.She watched him laugh, all pretense of arrogance, of tough-guy machismo set aside, and felt that she was truly seeing him for the first time, the real Billy Coen. She realized in that moment that she had thoroughly failed her first assignment. He was no more her prisoner than she was his. Assuming they survived, if he ran, she wouldn't be able to bring herself to stop him.
So much for a career in law enforcement.
The thought made her laugh even harder.
